Are your attempts at pumpkin pie dough getting you down? Can’t roll it out because it’s either too tough or crumbly? Is it sticking to your counter and rolling pin even with heavy dustings of flour? Did the crust turn into a soggy mess after baking?

Ditch the pie dough and bake it on streusel instead.

Baked flat and sliced into square or rectangular portions, pavé pastries are so named because of its resemblance to tiles or paving stones. The dessert itself is the farthest thing from a brick, though. In this recipe, the smooth cream cheese filling is lightly sweetened to let some of its mellow tang through. With the addition of allspice and cinnamon, pumpkin pavé will be familiar even if its name and appearance are anything but.

Aside from being less finicky than pie dough, streusel is probably the ideal serving platform for the creamy pumpkin filling. Its crumbly texture provides much-needed contrast, and more importantly, because of the addition of ground pumpkin seeds, doesn’t fade into the background flavor-wise.

View Pumpkin Pavé Recipe - Spiced Pumpkin Filling on Streusel »

Cream-based scones are as quick and easy as scones can get. This recipe requires nothing more than cream and any combination of dried fruits and nuts of your choice. There is no waiting for butter to soften at room temperature. There are no eggshells to crack and fish out of your pyrex. It takes about 30 minutes from measuring the ingredients to pulling out trays of freshly-baked scones from the oven.

In addition to the short ingredient list, creams scones use the simplest and most well-known method for making quick breads. The muffin method calls for nothing more than adding the wet ingredients to the dry ingredients, much like making pancake batter but with less liquid. Other mixing methods for scones are the finicky biscuit method, where cold fat is cut into flour until pea-sized, and the labor-intensive creaming method, where room temperature butter is fluffed with sugar through vigorous, uh, creaming.

There is no “creaming” in a cream scone. Go figure.

The muffin method produces scones with a moist interior and slightly crumbly crust, a welcome contrast to the nutty crunchiness of pumpkin seeds in each bite.

View Pumpkin Seed Cream Scone Recipe »

Making pâte à choux has always been intimidating but now that I’ve tried it once, I can’t wait to use it again. Gazing at the colorful options behind glass display cases in local pastry shops, I’m thinking, “I can’t make any of this.” Now I can proudly cross out éclairs, cream puffs, profiteroles, and Paris-Brest out of The Long List of Things I Can’t Must Make.

The pastry dough is cooked twice, first on the stovetop to create a paste and then finished in the oven after piping the desired shape. Choux is French for “cabbage,” referring to the irregular shape that a round piece of pâte à choux takes. While baking, steam is trapped inside the dough to create a crisp hollow shell. It can serve as the perfect wrapper for fillings such as ice cream for profiteroles and in the case of éclairs, decadent chocolate pastry cream.

View Pierre Hermé's Chocolate Éclairs recipe »

Do you twist Oreos apart and eat the filling by itself? Doing the same filling finagling maneuver with Fig Newtons is a lot messier but I can’t help it. The is-it-cake-or-is-it-cookie sawdust exterior merely gets in the way of fig enjoyment by jamming itself in between teeth and up roofs of mouth. It’s nothing more than a bland delivery device for the sweet interior if you ask me.

I only want the fig filling. This classic Spanish method for preserving and spicing figs satisfies that need and soundly beats anything an automatic fig extruder can produce.

Unlike Oreo filling, which is basically shortening creamed with sugar, figs and almonds are the main ingredients in pan de higo so it also has a lot going for it in the nutritional value department. Both are packed with nutrients — figs are rich in fiber and almonds supposedly keep you smart. Compare with the effects of eating massive amounts of sweetened semisolid fat: sugar high, crash, guilt, and depression, most likely in that order.

View Pan de Higo - Spanish Fig Cake recipe »

The thought of gently clasping a star-tipped pastry bag to make cookies was laughable until fairly recently. It may not seem obvious from posts that involve feats of manual dexterity and shameless whipping, but I am, in fact, a red-blooded male.

While I appreciate any passing mention from fellow bloggers that find my posts somewhat amusing, I can’t help but feel awkward when referred to as a “she” or “her.” Is it my writing style? Is it my amateurish attempts at styling my food photos? My recipe selection, perhaps? Should I start posting about steaks, buffalo wings, and chili?

In any case, these buttery cookies do not help my case at all. For one thing, they’re French. Things that require accented characters to spell or nasal inflection to pronounce are generally associated with sophistication and plucked eyebrows, neither of which apply to me. The recent spectacle of French emasculation in front of an audience of 1.3 billion can also only worsen things, so I’m in a bit of a pinch.

View recipe for Sables à la Poche Cookies »